Announcing his decision on Saturday, Lone argued that it was time for separatists to "unglue" themselves from old and failing approaches, and insisted that for him the change was only "of strategy and not of ideology".

But questions remain about what we are supposed to do with the panic of the last few weeks: whether we shelve our mass hysteria until fall flu season, when some experts predict the pandemic potential will go fully global, or whether we retreat back into our comfort zone and ignore the inevitability that another crisis is bound to thoroughly unglue us.